Many changes around here lately — new styles, new software, new hardware, and a whole lot more. I will be covering several of these items in greater depth in future posts, but for now, here is an overview of some of the recent happenings unfolding here in Perishable land.. New Mobile Styles I finally took the time to throw down some tuff mobile CSS styles for Perishable Press. Before, the site was virtually impossible to use via mobile devices because of the comprehensively applied screen styles, which completely overwhelm the screen real-estate and system resources of the average mobile device. […] Read more »

Keeping track of your access and error logs is a critical component of any serious security strategy. Many times, you will see a recorded entry that looks legitimate, such that it may easily be dismissed as genuine Google fare, only to discover upon closer investigation a fraudulent agent. There are many such cloaked or disguised agents crawling around these days, mimicking various search engines to hide beneath the radar. Thus, it is a good idea to implement a procedure for scanning and checking select agents for authenticity. In general, the verification process involves a “forward/reverse” DNS lookup, which is then […] Read more »

In the hellish battle against spam, many WordPress users have adopted a highly effective trinity of anti-spam plugins: Akismet Bad Behavior (404 link removed 2012/06/04) Spam Karma This effective triage of free WordPress plugins has served many a WP-blogger well, eliminating virtually 99% of all automated comment-related spam. When spam first became a problem for me, I installed this triple-threat arsenal of anti-spam plugins and immediately enjoyed the results. Although Spam Karma seemed a little invasive and resource-intensive, too much protection seemed far better than not enough. Even so, during the most recent redesign of the site, one of my […] Read more »

Insanity reigns in the blogosphere! Check out this sweet little spam comment that found its way to my moderation queue.. Cloth Hello to all, its my new pages about cloth cloth diaper You can buy here 24\7. Yes indeed, “Cloth diaper”!! Come on now, is the competition really that fierce in the cloth diaper industry that companies must turn to the slimy spam cartel for scummy comment links? “its my new pages about cloth” — WTF?!!! Dude! I can’t wait to check out your sweet-ass pages about cloth diapers. Can I check out some killer cloth-diaper photos while I’m there? […] Read more »

After switching Perishable Press to its current home at A Small Orange, I began noticing an unusual problem with referrer data displayed in Mint. Specifically, the first item recorded in the XXX Strong Mint data panel — for both “Most Recent” and “Repeat” views — displayed several thousand hits for various site resources, all from the following IP address: 127.255.255.255 zxw59eit.emirates.net.ae Apparently, this particular location represents an invalid “loopback address.” The requested resources appear valid, indicating typical traffic patterns, but the loopback address is not the actual referrer. This issue was preventing Mint from accurately recording mountains of vital referral […] Read more »

Recently, a reader named Max encountered some scrolling issues while implementing our absolutely centered layout technique. Of course, by “absolutely centered” we are referring to content that remains positioned dead-center regardless of how the browser is resized. After noticing the scrollbar deficiency, Max kindly dropped a comment to explain the issue: …the div solution works well, only one problem maybe somebody can help: if you make the browser window smaller then the div is -> the scrollbar doenst fit right und you cant scroll over the whole area… Apparently, because the horizontal/vertical centering method outlined in our original article employs […] Read more »

Several days ago, I posted an article explaining how to hack your own WordPress nofollow blacklist. Immediately thereafter, I published an elaborate article focusing on automatic methods of nofollow blacklisting via WordPress plugins. In this article, I expand on the original blacklist hack by incorporating functional differentiation between commentator links, trackbacks, and pingbacks. If anything, think of this as an exercise in hacking WordPress, rewarding in and of itself, if not otherwise entirely impractical. Of course, whenever possible, you should avoid hacking the WordPress core and install a plugin instead. ;) Nonetheless, it’s so much fun to hack that we […] Read more »

Before repenting of my filthy “nofollow” addiction, I experimented briefly with a “dofollow whitelist” for commentator URL links. The idea behind the whitelist is to reward frequent commentators, feed subscribers, site patrons, and other guests by selectively removing the automatically generated nofollow attributes from their associated comment-author links. For nofollow enthusiasts, a dofollow whitelist is a great way to show appreciation for people who support your blogging efforts. Now, before we go hacking away at WordPress, keep in mind that there are a few potential shortcomings to this method. First of all, manually maintaining such a list would eventually fail. […] Read more »

Previously, in our unofficial “WordPress dofollow upgrade” series, we dished several techniques for removing the antisocial nofollow attributes from default installations of WordPress. After an exhaustive review of available dofollow plugins, we explained how drop-dead easy it is to transform any WordPress blog into a well-standing member of the dofollow community without relying on a plugin to do the job. Our next article detailed a nofollow removal hack selectively targeting pingbacks, trackbacks, and commentator links. Then, we went off the deep end with a robust, threefold hack for sitewide nofollow extermination. Now, in this article, we merge several of these […] Read more »

Encourage Comments by Completely Eliminating All Nofollow Links Want to remove all traces of the hideous nofollow attribute without having to install yet another unnecessary plugin? By default, WordPress generates nofollow links in three different ways — this article will show you how to eliminate all of them.. Some context please.. Note: if you are already familiar with the various functions involved in the nofollow-removal process, please feel free to skip the proceeding discussion and jump directly to the tutorial. WordPress adds nofollow to all trackbacks, pingbacks, and commentator links We have seen how simple it is to eradicate nofollow […] Read more »

After our previous article, we all know how easy it is to kill the default nofollow attributes that WordPress automatically injects into all commentator, trackback, and pingback links. Indeed, our original one-minute upgrade delivers dofollow links across the board, effectively passing the love juice to every type of response. Fine for some, but some need more.. In this article, we improve the original dofollow upgrade by differentiating between the three different response types. With our “deluxe” model, nofollow attributes may be removed selectively from trackbacks, pingbacks, commentator links, or any combination thereof. For example, you may remove nofollow from commentator […] Read more »

Want to upgrade your blog to official dofollow status but don’t want to install another unnecessary plugin? This article explains how to eliminate nofollow tags from all trackback, pingback, and commentator links in less than one minute.. After finally repenting of my nofollow sins, I began looking for the best way to eliminate the nofollow attributes that WordPress automatically injects into all commentator URL links. Of course, the most popular technique for removing nofollow attributes from comment links involves one of the many fine dofollow plugins that are freely available to WordPress users. Beyond nofollow removal, many of these plugins […] Read more »

Recently, while deliberating an optimal method for eliminating nofollow link attributes from Perishable Press, I collected, installed, tested and reviewed every WordPress no-nofollow/dofollow plugin that I could find. In this article, I present a concise, current, and comprehensive reference for WordPress no-nofollow and dofollow plugins. Every attempt has been made to provide accurate, useful, and complete information for each of the plugins represented below. Further, as this subject is a newfound interest of mine, it is my intention to keep this post updated with fresh information, so please bookmark it for future reference. Finally, please help expand/enhance this list by […] Read more »

Hello, my name is Jeff and I am nofollow addict. When I first began Perishable Press two years ago, in August of 2005, WordPress quickly became my blogging platform of choice. Everything about WordPress was great, so I had no trouble overlooking a few seemingly insignificant quirks, such as the nofollow attributes that are automatically applied to all comment links. In fact, at first, I really had no idea what they were or how they affected my site. Eventually, as I began delving deeper into the Blogosphere, I realized that those harmless-looking nofollow tags were considered by many to be […] Read more »

During the most recent Perishable Press redesign, I noticed that several of my WordPress admin pages had been assigned significant levels of PageRank. Not good. After some investigation, I realized that my ancient robots.txt rules were insufficient in preventing Google from indexing various WordPress admin pages. Specifically, the following pages have been indexed and subsequently assigned PageRank: WP Admin Login Page WP Lost Password Page WP Registration Page WP Admin Dashboard Needless to say, it is important to stop WordPress from leaking PageRank to admin pages. Instead of wasting our hard-earned link-equity on non-ranking pages, let’s redirect it to more […] Read more »

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Perishable Press is the work of Jeff Starr, professional developer, designer, author, and publisher with over 10 years of experience.
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Fun fact: Perishable Press has been online since 2005, and features over 800 articles and more than 11,000 comments. More stats »